


Will You Love Me When I Come Back?

by DetectiveJoan



Category: Fablehaven Series - Brandon Mull
Genre: F/M, Kid Fic, Post-Canon, Snapshots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-13
Updated: 2017-03-13
Packaged: 2018-10-03 21:05:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10258265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetectiveJoan/pseuds/DetectiveJoan
Summary: Warren shoves his hands into his pockets awkwardly. "Where are you going to go?"Vanessa shrugs. "I'm not sure yet."





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Ella Eyre's _If I Go_

Vanessa leaves as soon as Agad’s finished putting Fablehaven back together.

“You know you’re welcome to stay,” Warren tells her, even as he lugs the last of her suitcases up from the dungeon and out to her car.

“I think I’ve stomached about as much of Ruth’s hostility as I can take,” Vanessa responds. After a pause she adds, “Not that it isn’t well-deserved.”

Warren shoves his hands into his pockets awkwardly and doesn’t bother arguing. “Where are you going to go?”

She shrugs. “I’m not sure yet,” she tells him, “but I’ll let you know when I get there.”

*

Vanessa burns through three cars and two fake passports before she picks up the phone. She’s in some city in Guatemala that Warren couldn’t pronounce the name of, holed up in a hotel on the seedier side of town. It isn’t the type of place she plans to stay in long, but she did promise Warren a phone call at some point.

She dials his number.

Kendra answers.

“Are you going to come back?” Kendra asks after they exchange slightly stilted small talk. She’s obviously aiming to sound nonchalant, but she misses by a mile.

“Of course,” Vanessa says. “Someday.”

*

Vanessa lands with some old friends in Italy, a small clan of narcoblixes with no taste for politics and no opinions on the recent goings on of the Society. It feels like going home, which is to say it feels like burying a vital part of herself for the sake of homogeneity.

She tells herself she’s going to stay there until she digs her feelings for Warren out of her chest.

The next time she calls him, he picks up.

“Everyone misses you,” he tells her.

She scoffs just loudly enough for him to hear.

“I miss you,” he corrects.

*

Caring about Warren is easier with an ocean between them, the same way it was easier when he was catatonic. She always had been more comfortable with the idea of relationships than with the reality of them. There isn’t any harm in keeping his number in her phone because something in her heart sparks every time she scrolls over it, but she lets a month drift by without calling him, then another and another.

Eventually, he calls her.

“A guy can’t wait by the phone forever, y’know” he says, nonchalant. “He’ll get the idea you don’t really care for him.”

*

She shows up on Fablehaven’s doorstep three years later with a blix toddler on her hip.

Marla -- whom Vanessa had hardly met in the frenzied aftermath of Zzyzx -- absolutely _coos_ at the sight of him. “What a cutie,” she says, even though his face is buried in Vanessa’s hair. “Can I hold him?”

Vanessa passes him over immediately.

Warren, standing close enough to touch, looks Vanessa dead in the eye. “Is he yours?” he asks, voice low.

She holds his gaze. “He is now.”

“He _is_ really cute,” Seth chimes in. “Are you sure he’s not some kind of goblin?”

*

“His family is dead,” Vanessa says flatly, when the child -- Matthew -- has been put to bed and everyone else has gathered to hear the story.

“The fairy king?” Dale guesses. Kendra looks perplexed when Vanessa nods.

“The fairy and unicorn populations have been on the rise since he was rescued from Zzyzx,” Ruth explains. “So many of them have left the fairy kingdom for the first time in millennia. We usually think of that as a good thing.”

“But?” Seth prompts.

“But unicorns like to hunt blixes for sport,” Warren says.

Vanessa’s grateful she doesn’t have to say it herself.

*

Later, Warren pulls Kendra aside and gestures for Vanessa to join them.

“I can’t believe unicorns would really do that,” Kendra is saying when Vanessa approaches.

“Creatures of light are not inherently good,” Warren reminds her. “Naiads kill humans without hesitation whenever they get the chance. Unicorns do the same to blixes.”

“Bracken would have done that to me,” Vanessa says gently. “If he and I had met without you there to vouch for me.”

She reaches out and takes Kendra’s hand. Kendra offers her a wan smile. “Then I guess you and Matthew should keep me around,” she says.

*

If Vanessa had expected Kendra to take an active interest in raising Matthew, she’d have been dead wrong. Seth, however, picks Matthew up the next morning and seems to never put him down.

More than anyone, it’s Seth who pulls Matthew onto his lap and reads him Dr. Seuss books, Seth who teaches Matthew how to swim and play football, Seth who blows raspberries against Matthew’s stomach until the toddler squeals with laughter and squirms away.

“They’re like a house on fire,” Marla says once, watching them romp around the yard.

Vanessa supposes that creatures of darkness recognize their own.

*

It’s surprisingly easy to settle in at Fablehaven. She almost hadn’t returned, expecting their distrust to carry the same sting it had when she left all those years ago, but she couldn’t think of a safer place to take Matthew.

Perhaps it’s Matthew’s round face and open-mouthed smile that softens the reception she initially receives, but as the weeks pass she has to suppose that time had simply healed over the scar of her betrayal.

“The preserve hasn’t been on the brink of collapse even once since you left. It’s almost been boring without you,” Warren says with a wink.

*

She lets Warren kiss her on the porch at dawn, when the house and the woods are equally quiet. His hand, curled around the nape of her neck, is a warm contrast to the bitter morning chill.

It’s hard to believe he still wants her, after everything he knows about everything she’s done, but his lips are sure and steady against her own, never once seeming hesitant or insincere.

After she pulls away, he buries his face in her hair, presses a kiss below her ear, whispers, “You know, you could have stayed.”

She wants so badly to believe him.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos are love <3


End file.
